The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected.
When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
The federal government wasn't supposed to represent the people though for the vast majority of its function, it was supposed to essentially mediate interstate affairs and provide protection from foreign incursion.
The vast majority of what it does now, which acts on people rather than states, is a result of exceeding the powers constrained in the 10th amendment. The federal government is breaking because it is operating way outside of its design envelope.
I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design -- although I will point out that the notion of an extremely constrained federal government was controversial then, hardly consensus among the founding fathers.
But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense to have a pseudo-house of lords with actual political power in the 21st century.
> But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity
For better or worse.
I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you. A municipal government is going to be a lot more responsive to people who live in that city vs the State / Provincial level, who have a much broader constituency. And the State / Provincial level is going to be a lot more responsive to its constituency than the Federal level.
Politics is the direct result of the philosophy of a culture. The more culturally people identify as "American" instead of "Californian", "Texan", "Virginian" etc. the more you're going to see the scope of the federal level expand, because that's what "the people" are asking for.
The problem with democracy is that people don't always vote or act in accordance with their objective best interests.
And not to go off on a tangent, but the cultural attitude towards democracy itself is indicative of my point. Culturally people tend to equate democracy with "freedom" even though democracy is but a tool. A perfectly appropriate tool for certain things (should we spend the city budget on a new sporting stadium or upgrades to our roads?). But there are other matters that should never, under any circumstance, be put to a vote (ex: what groups of people have rights).
> I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you.
This works very well for the local wealth crowd. It is much easier to capture city or county government than it is state, and much easier to capture state government than federal. In fact, one of the reasons that we need a more powerful federal government than we did 200 years ago is precisely that local non-governmental power (read: rich folk) has grown in scale that often even state government cannot control it adequately.
There's no inherent reason federal government cannot be just as responsive as more local ones, other than an entire political philosophy and party that is committed to the idea that this is not just impossible but morally wrong.
It works well for everyone. The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.
You're effectively saying that because you're worried about the "local wealth crowd" "capturing" government, you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
It's not clear how that would make it easier for the "non local wealth crowd" to affect change while it makes it harder for the "wealth crowd" ? Although maybe "local" is the key word here? I mean, that would imply that you're OK with global mega-corps capturing the federal level as long as they are not local companies. But I think I'd be straw-manning you to assume that's your position, and I'm not trying to strawman you. I'm just illustrating the logical conclusion of your idea if I take it at face value.
For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of protectionist economic policies. But if I were, I might offer that "local wealth" at least provides value at the local level (jobs, economic growth etc.) whereas global mega-corps have interests outside of the country.
In any case, it's not at all clear how making it less difficult for the "local wealth crowd" makes it easier for the "non local wealth crowd." As I see it, you just make government farther removed for everyone. Disadvantaging both groups equally. But if you're ideologically driven by a hatred of wealth and of capitalism, then maybe that's well understood and we are all sacrificial lambs on offer.
> The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.
No, this is not a problem with government for and by the people. It is, however, a problem in a system in which economic power (read: wealth) translates (often almost literally) into political power for individuals. Rich people deserve a vote just like everyone else - but nothing more.
> you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
You say "farther removed" - I say "larger, less dependent on local influence, and with more power". As I said, there is an entire political philosophy and party that insists that responsive federal level government is not possible; as I implied, I simply don't agree with this. Of course, if that philosophy/party has significant political power, then federal government will be less responsive, but that's not inherent.
Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential.
Do we need to be careful to not have the federal level squash deserved local variation? Yes, absolutely. But we also do not have to give in to the self-interested claim that federal government cannot serve the interests of the people well, either.
>Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential.
It boggles the mind that you can say this with a straight face. What do you think vesting more power at the federal level will do if not cause moneyed interests to work harder to capture it?
I think people are far too cynical. A highly visible federal government is in many ways more defensible from monied interests than many many small scale decisionmakers.
What do we have if not a highly visible federal government? And yet here we are talking about a hemp ban snuck into a funding bill at the behest of other industries.
I haven't argued for the federal level to override local variations, in fact I specifically said that it's an important problem to figure out how to avoid this.
The first problem is that city/county/state governments in general have completely inadequate power to confront national or trans-national corporations. The second problem is that some things (e.g. health insurance) really do work better when handled at the largest possible scale.
There are clearly things, like running the municipal rec center, where local government is better positioned than any federal government agency probably ever could be (though I stress "probably"). But there are lots of things where the opposite is true.
If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands about trying to level out concerns between smaller and larger states, which is why it was created with years of debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.
Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair,"
Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
"This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones."
The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact on Presidential elections as well.
The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it stands is fine.
> The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced.
As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that argues farmers deserve extra votes for dumb reasons.
One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan area into a bunch of new states that would be the same population as Wyoming and 100% urban, and they'd still get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.
This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district to the population of the least populates state, we'd end up with more House seats, many of which would be apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state population).
I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.
Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside the PAA.
I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.
It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never happen because the state governments would never give up any power.
Huntington-Hill is better than nothing but it is still significantly worse than getting rid of the PAA and letting the House grow based on population size. Pressing my hand down on a bullet wound will slow the bleeding more than if I didn't, but not getting shot to begin with would sure be preferable.
This argues for just an increase to 700, and shows a ~5% swing in likelihood of Democrat control, and I would argue that just increasing it to 700 is still not where we want to be - a ratio similar to the UK would put us at closer to 3k representatives, and I believe this is still within reason (and is roughly the size of the equivalent chamber in China). Ideally we get rid of gerrymandering at the same time and redistricting is done apolitically by independent groups.
At 3k seats, every state is above their 1 rep minimum, representatives have 1/7th the number of constituents, population to representation at each state is much closer to 1:1, etc. Obviously not everything will end up on clean divisible lines so there's going to be some differences, but Wyoming would be more like .96:1 instead of .75:1 like they are currently.
Ideally the size should also be set to be revisited based on population on a periodic basis
If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair.
If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other.
For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...
"If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair."
Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's.
"For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..."
That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd.
Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions.
> The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state
I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
"The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd."
Perhaps you can read the history then.
"I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025."
I'm not sure that I missed anything. Perhaps I just disagree with the degree that things like interstate commerce and taxes have been contorted to be, to the degree that basic logic and reading skills have been abandoned to justify whatever those with power feel like. Just as you have opinions about what you see as problems with the Senate.
The problem is that the number of house members per state is capped, which results in more-populous states having less influence per-capita than less-populous states. So, in a way, more-populous states are disadvantaged in both the house and senate.
You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans.
That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation?
The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this.
It would be one thing if people were actually asking for this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly not. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it and the legislature just writes it knowing full well that the "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation, the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election time.
I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything. It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
But who in bumfuck is going to stop you exactly? Are you talking about a grid-tie system, where you feedback to the power company? My experience in rural areas is that after the initial approval for utilities if needed, no one is coming back to inspect anything.
Why is your rural county spending resources to find these unpermitted installations? Sounds like you should vote for better local representatives who don't do stuff you dislike.
But even if it wasn't your local government, insurance companies do this sort of thing to deny claims even in tangentially related unapproved installations.
> The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it.
Asserted without evidence.
Many parts of the USA until sometime in the 1980s had no building codes. Now many of them do (some still go without). Society has made a slow and steady move towards saying, in effect "whatever and wherever you build, we want to be certain that it meets a set of minimum design and construction standards, and we justify this with both public safety (fire, for example) and the interests of anyone who may acquire what you built in the future".
You can say, if you like, that this is bullshit. But don't try to claim that they didn't even think about you.
p.s. I live in rural New Mexico and installed my own solar panels, under license from the state.
The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
Just solar panels. They simply forgot.
FYI i built the house after the solar panel law passed. So it's not like it's an old house that needs brought up to modern code or something.
Solar panels are generators that backfeed the line. Power utilities are going to take every opportunity to discourage/prevent/penalize the connection of generators to their lines.
Connecting your house to the grid poses more or less no threat to the grid or the linemen who work on it.
> The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
But since your house is (presumably) not a generator, no, that's still less connected to others than even a single solar panel would be.
What on earth do roof and [structural] building plans have to do with eletrical connectivity to the grid? You're losing the plot and trying to lead us down another sideshow, that is the things i called out as the specific things city dwellers forgot I dont have that they require for the solar permit. 'Society' already decided i don't need those for literally anything else residential but solar.
The most likely explanation is they simply forgot rural folks often don't have roof plans, and should have written an exception in such case that the solar permit could be issued without them.
I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
Is it not obvious why this is the case. If rural dwellers are cut off from the outputs of a city their lives are mostly unchanged and not impacted. If the city dwellers are cut off from the output of rural areas their existence is wildly constrained. How much food / energy / and raw materials do cities typically produce? Obviously there has to be a balance but you have to look at it logically and recognize that one is far more critical than the other.
But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of people who live in truly rural American outsize power over everyone else.
(*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not subsistence farmers.
I'm from an even smaller political entity than Wyoming, although we don't get any Senate representation at all. It would be beyond absurd to grant us equal voting power to California and obviously not a sustainable way of constructing a political system.
Good point - and also whoops on forgetting that, should have remembered from my DC history class where they drill in that we have a larger population than Wyoming and Vermont yet no rep
Surely you see the irony in the guy from DC wanting more direct democracy at a point in the nation's history when "drop a nuke on DC, see if things improve" would probably be a winning ballot measure in most states.
>>rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns
But effectively giving dirt a vote clearly isn't the solution. When voting maps are made weighted by strict land area they look one way, but weighted by population, they look entirely different, e.g., [0]
Or, should Wyoming, with a population of 587,618 as of 2024 [1] really have as many senators as the 39,431,263 people in California [2]? California has nearly five times the rural population of Wyoming [3], yet all rural and urban Californians get only 1.4% of the representative power of anyone living in Wyoming. Does a Wyoming resident really deserve 67X the representation of people in California?
I absolutely think rural concerns must be heard and met, but this setup is not right, and is clearly not meeting those concerns.
Because the rural folks think that "bad people" live in cities. (Don't ask them too many questions about what makes them bad; it's almost certainly bigotry.)
It has nothing to do with land. It's about the political subdivisions that are states, and how those states have differing concerns (can even be seen in the talks about different commerce and trade concerns when the country was formed).
Cities have no representation at the federal level, so we can leave those out of the question.
Why have states? Why indeed!
One answer: to create a level of governmental organization smaller than the federal one that can act as a set of laboratories for legislative and legal experimentation.
Another answer: to reflect the fact that not all laws and regulations make sense across a diverse range of climate and geography and demographics and economies.
Neither of those answers, however, require states to be considered inviolable sovereign entities, and a lot of us born after 1880 don't think of them that way.
I'm not going to do the math, but California has a larger rural area, a larger rural population, and a larger number of rural communities than, oh, I don't know, the ten least populous states combined? So at this point we have fewer rural communities overriding more rural communities just because of where state boundaries are draw.
Urban concerns are steamrolled by the rural concerns. Rural people literally hate and attack urban living people and urban people are supposed to smile and treat them nicely.
"Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though."
That's your opinion. The opinion of people in Wyoming is likely different. What the facts would show if you look into the history of why the Senate was necessary, it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving. The real problem is that the scope of decisions at the federal level has gotten ridiculous due to "interstate commerce" and "taxes", so we now operate more at the federal level than the system originally intended.
Yes, in case you didn't notice, everything we are stating is opinions.
I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree.
I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
> I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it exists. So without that compromise, the country would not exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently to today). You can't just renege on that deal 250 years later and figure people should be ok with it.
I think it's completely fine to renege on deals that were made with people who have been dead for centuries, actually, if there's a good reason to.
Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th amendment. Maybe those people would have made different life choices if they knew that their slaves would be freed in the future. Tough luck.
A bunch of states wouldn't have entered the union without the compromise on slavery.
But we ended that "compromise" some time ago. No reason that equal Senate representation, or even general state "sovereignty" couldn't be revisited either.
>why do you think your opinions can outweigh other’s?
I don't see where this is implied. I took the implication of "your opinion did not sway my own"
>Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
The "logic" is "larger states in a democracy should have more power because they represent more people". Which naively makes sense. I'm sure game theory would show some consequence of this formation though as a bunch of smaller states coalition around each other and make a two party system based on land, as opposed to ideology.
It wouldn't male sense, but an opinion in this case is the argument, no? You can disagree with an opinion and also think your own isn't necessarily superior.
In much of internet discourse, your goal isn't even to convince the person to reply to, it's to give more viewpoints to the silent majority who lurk and never comment. Whether they think an opinion is better or worse is up to them.
I can also just say:”All the opinions presented so far are deficient, here is my new, better, opinion X”
By your logic if I replied with that to every comment chain in every HN post adjusting X to each topic… then I would become the most productive HN user of all time.
>I can also just say:”All the opinions presented so far are deficient, here is my new, better, opinion X”
Yes, I browse reddit every now and then. It's a shame the Alt-Right pipeline hijacked this. They realized that being loud is better than being correct.
I'm a bit confused on how we got onto a tangent about productivity, though. All I was talking about came down to "opinions are arguments, and restating an opinion (in good faith) often means you aren't convinced of another opinion". They're opinions, they aren't inherently right or wrong.
I interacted with someone from Wyoming once. She made this point: Wyoming has a lot of Native Americans, and it struck her as contradictory when people would say "native Americans are underrepresented" alongside "Wyomingites are overrepresented." Of course there's nuance but it was interesting in any case.
Wyoming has 16k native americans. California has 762k native americans (if you agree with self-id, which I don't). Your friend clearly must be in favor of disenfranchising these native americans if she thinks her Wyoming vote should count for 67 native american votes in California.
In general, I don't find the idpol defense of 67x relative voting power for Wyoming's particularly compelling.
If you could read you'd see (A) I didn't refer to her as a friend and (B) I didn't mention her political affiliation. In fact your assumption is wrong.
It wasn't a very political conversation but yes it could be used that way. I'll say this though. Isn't that what Native Americans need? They are in fact a tiny percent.
no, i don’t think we should move towards some sort of race-based confessional system. minority rights, sure - but the color of your skin should not impact your vote share.
If we truly believed in a capitalistic system, wouldn't the US become a hyper aggressive competiton to make the most citizens settle in their given state? It would bring down home prices, offer amenities, fight cut throat for the best labor laws, and so much more.
But it seems like we gave up and focused on a republic when it came to this matter instead.
I think that's a very idealistic idea. The reality is that some people / land area are simply far more important than others. It's not to say that the individual themselves is more meaningful as a matter of state, but there positioning, role in society etc simply carries more raw value than others.
The US is huge and you have a major divide from the producers and the benefiters, the most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers. Mainly your food production, natural resource extraction, and logistical operations are what allows the entire rest of the country to function.
You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers, but even if you accept that premise, it is immediately undermined by California.
California is an both a service economy and agricultural powerhouse, the number one producer of agricultural value in the US by far. Other states with heavily urbanized populations like like Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin all produce a ton of agricultural value.
Are you saying that California deserves more representation for having a lot of farms then?
Not to mention as agriculture and resource extraction industrialized and has automated, its required a smaller percentage of the labor force than ever before.
So why should the industrial base of a state have anything to do with how well citizens are represented?
>I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers
Ok, which would you rather forgo for a month / a year / a lifetime? The output of a city, or the food and energy outputs of the rural areas.
I don't see how California is undermining anything. California has a lot of both rural and urban areas like many states, that doesn't change the premise and California is known for bending over backwards and taking a lot of detrimental actions to support their agricultural industry.
> most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers
Yes, but large cities still produce the most value if we're talking in economic terms. For food production especially. Most logistical operation also operates in large cities.
>You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
Well, yes. That was the big comprmise made by the constitution to begin with. They needed something like a Senate to get smaller states to sign on.
But we aren't talking in economic terms. We are talking in political terms. The economy is an offshoot of the functioning political system. Contextually they are different things although logically intertwined, but resources and their management / allocation is what gives rise to the idea of governance and that governance implements the economic system etc. Without the resources there isn't really anything to govern. The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
And I mean, obviously the current situation is not this way because we have a very functioning system, most rural people don't even use the food and resources that are extracted around them anyway as we import and move things around at an unprecedented scale. But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level. You literally can not support the cities without the rural output, even if the larger value, monetarily, is created in the urban area.
I use economics because I don't know how to politically measure "success". As it is now, what a politician wants is clearly divorced from what their constituents want.
>The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
But thse large states also help fund small states. Which small states are considered "donor states".
> But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level.
California is the 4th largest world economy. It can certainly break off and operate fine by itself if things got truly dire. The main thing missing is a standing army and nukes. The latter of which is probably the main bargaining chip of the smaller states at this point.
I think you underestimate how efficient the larger states can be. And overestimate the economic value of the smaller ones under the stereotype that "they produce the most food". They produce a lot, but not the most.
But per-worker productivity is higher in larger states - so there goes that maker vs. taker justification of up-weighting rural areas. Regardless, plenty of other countries continue to produce adequate amounts of food despite a much more central approach.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
Er, why?
I understand why the country needed this at the beginning. It was a union of sovereign nations. The states were effectively the constituents of the federal government and it makes sense to have a body where each one is represented equally. And in practical terms, there was a real risk that the smaller states wouldn't have joined the union if they didn't have something that compensated for the increased power the larger states had due to their population.
But today? The states are glorified administrative divisions. They still have some independent power but it's not a lot. And there's no option to leave the union.
We still have the Senate in its current form due to inertia and the fact that the states that get disproportionate power from the current form of the Senate also have disproportionate power in deciding whether it changes. It's hard to convince the smaller states to give up that power.
The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires:
1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population
2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent the will or needs of the states themselves.
As an example of why that distinction is relevant, consider Rhode Island. With a population of 1.1 million people, 100 reserved seats plus one seat per 500k would give Rhode Island 4 votes. Meanwhile, California's population of 38.9 million would give it 70 votes. That prohibits effectively representing Rhode Island as a state in any meaningful way.
As it is now, vote-by-population could allow a small number of states with the majority of population to out-vote the entire rest of the country, passing a law that states that all healthcare should be made free and the states have to pay for it themselves. Large states with strong economies and large tax bases might be in favor of that, but smaller and less populous states with weaker economies would go bankrupt.
Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. Many of them see the federal government as not much more than a necessary evil to help the independent-but-united states coordinate themselves and prosper together. I remember someone once saying that it used to be "The United States are..." and not "The United States is..." and that kind of gives you an idea of the separation.
The best comparison might be the EU, where you could imagine the large, rich countries with large populations wanting to pass a vote that the smaller, poorer countries might chafe against. Imagine an EU resolution that said that all countries must spend at least 70 billion euro on defense; fine for large countries like Germany which already do, but absurd for a smaller country like Malta. The senate exists to prohibit that sort of unfairness in the US federal government.
Additionally, the Senate in original form was actually selected by the states (or rather, their governments). Direct election of Senators only came about in the early 20th century with the 17th Amendment.
And this whole discussion gets further complex when you consider the US uses an antiquated indirect system to elect the President (who in our government is more akin to a Prime Minister in many parliamentary systems than the ceremonial president in those same systems).
In the US, each state gets a number of electors who elect the President. The number is based on the number of Sentators plus the number of House members. So the smallest states are guaranteed 3 electors no matter how out of proportion that count may be.
The consequence of this is in my lifetime, Republicans have won the Presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote (and thrice with a majority)...
2000 - George W Bush won with 47% of the vote to Al Gore's 51%.
2016 - Trump won with 46% to Clinton's 56%.
Reagan, Bush Snr, and Trump (2nd term) won with majorities of the popular vote.
Notably, a Democrat has NEVER won the presidency with LESS than a majority.
For those of who are both residents of moderately sized states, and also lean left on political issues, this certainly feels like a massive structural problem.
> The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country.
This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I feel like this is something I am intimately familiar with.
> Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
Before 1913, State's legislatures would elect their US Senators. Since 1913, Senators are directly elected but to longer terms than their peers in the House, as a way to make them less beholden to the whims of the zeitgeist and more stable in their consideration of "what serves the state" in that they do not face elections immediately and the results of their work are meant to be evaluated over a longer period. -- this is the intent, reality may bear out differently
> What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
The Senate is limited to two seats per state. With the current 50 states, that makes 100 members. So only 51 seats need vote against a bill they feel would harm their states. As the Senate is divided up, a very populous state (California) receives two, just like a very small state (Delaware) receives two, so each is on "equal footing" with the other states. [note that "small" here refers to population, not land area]
If everyone was all mixed together into one bowl, then a populous state like California (52 house seats, plus 2 senators for 54) is 22% of the total votes needed for a simple majority, all by themselves.
Also, states have their own militaries. Some states even have multiple. All states have an Army National Guard and some have and Air National Guard. Those militaries can be federalized, but normally pertain to the state. Some states even have other military branches such as Texas, which has a State Guard which cannot be federalized.
>Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.
edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.
Point is, they would not have different roles, but instead work as a single house which votes on issues and laws and then delegates the result to the executive branch. No dual ”clubs” or houses with separate votes or separate elections.
Part of the point of the split when the US Congress was designed was to intentionally make it difficult for bills to pass, because they had to pass votes in two independent houses, that (presumably) were focused on differing agendas.
This inherent difficulty was the intended outcome to try to assure that only bills which had strong support overall from different perspectives and viewpoints would make it through the double gauntlet.
You have essentially described the current US Senate/House as it was originally set out in the constitution.
One group of limited seats, with equal seats per state (the Senate). This is the "guarantee of at least X seats" to each state part.
A second group with the number of seats determined directly by population (the House). This is "the rest set ... according to census data on population".
One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
> One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
Thankfully, the Permanent Apportionment Act is not actually a constitutional amendment and could be corrected with the passing of legislation rather than needing to go through a full amendment process.
Not as far as my limited understanding is, USA still has a Congress and a House, and the comment thread I replied was specifically about abolishing the Congress for a different solution. And as far as
I know USA has not abolished the Congress, right?
Congress as a whole? I don't know if there's anything unique it solves. It's merely the US's compromise to balance between a monarchy and a weak federal government with little control over the coalition of states.
The big issue is that our House of Representatives stopped being proportional to the population some 90 years ago. I believe analysts suggested that a House today would have over 1000 members, as to the 435 seats today. So that only increases representation of smaller states.
Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set according to census data on population") and senate ("guaranteeing each state X seats") already do what you suggest.
Amazingly some guys thought it up hundreds of years ago. Is your issue that it is bicameral? If so what advantage would one house have?
> Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set according to census data on population")
This is repeated all over this thread, but it is just no longer actually true.
The Permanent Apportionment Act means that it is only partially tied to census data. The low cap and guaranteed seats mean that low population states have more power per capita in the house to a significant degree.
The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.
Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).
The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.
Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.
For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.
Having representation based on land/physical space will increasingly be seen as absurd.
Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.
> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
I’d argue the opposite. Congress could use more members so that it can have more sub-committees to craft legislation with more detail and taking on a larger number of issues with more precision.
There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.
Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.
And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
Very few legislators have expertise in anything except demagoguery, pandering, and graft. Having more of them to form more subcommittees to mess up more areas of the law... no thanks.
We need merit-selected technical committees of non-representatives to advise politicians and tell them clearly, in as much detail as necessary, when they're wrong on something. If the politicians don't listen, the technical committees should be independent and able to make their case on the internet and social media.
Implementing that would be difficult. The metric for merit is a challenge, and is itself easily coopted by politics. For example, China's vaunted "political meritocracy" is ultimately controlled by party leaders in the CCP, so it's basically a meritocracy for the CCP-aligned, not a meritocracy for anyone else. If a government's goals contradict facts-on-the-ground, the government will find a way to skew an "independent" technical committee to suppress those facts.
The main reason I think this is wrong is that the sheer amount of different things the government needs to pay attention to in the modern world is staggering. In my view, it is well beyond what a few hundred reps can pay attention to. I think if you scale it, what you end up with is that representatives can be more specialized in ways that align with their constituency instead of being bad generalists.
I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said something in order to make an argument, you don’t really have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k reps can’t run a country either.
The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.
Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.
"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people"
They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
I understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and more contested in the late 18th century.
"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does"
But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?
> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts.
People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power.
I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got representation in congress in the first place. I understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
"Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here."
I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
> The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
It explicitly does not due to Permanent Apportionment Act. It is more proportional than the senate, but the hard cap on the size of the House and it no longer growing with population still fundamentally skews more power per capita to lower population states.
Whether people do or do not move based on voting influence is irrelevant to my argument. In fact, if people did move based on where they have voting influence it would be much less of a problem.
Compact is gone. They declared themselves domestic terrorists at their conventions, then once in power they declare anyone else are the domestic terrorists and start disappearing citizens without due process to other countries/cecot.
"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones."
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress).
I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.
Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.
It's worse than the founding though because Congress has artificially capped its growth. If the house of representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.
Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.
Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.
I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of any party) to actually represent their constituents accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground.
It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented
There's a widespread misunderstanding about what congresspeople do.
They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those representatives whose agendas they most closely support. There's a subtle difference.
> Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.
The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.
Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.
I'd like a hybrid system like we have in a number of states. A mechanism for nationwide initiative petitions would be nice. Then we can get nationwide consensus on the high-level issues and leave the rest for the people whose job it is to work out the details.
The worst laws come from direct amendments and petitions because only the stuff no lawmaker actually wants their name on (or could pass) goes there - and it gets gamed to hell.
See the CA propositions - they turn into insane population wide gaslighting competitions.
Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
> Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
> So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
Your argument would make sense if the courts had overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what happened.
The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts. The federal courts ruled against it, in a completely separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.
It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.
So you’re saying popular votes are not sufficient to avoid flip flops on contentious issues, and popular voting also can step on minority groups recognized rights on a whim?
What problem is it solving again?
And notably, California is one of the most consistently gay friendly states and still flip flopped on this exact topic.
The more direct the democracy (and the shorter the timeframes between elections!), the easier it is to game the population or poke people’s buttons and make them vote on things they later regret - or deeply enjoy.
The whole court system and bill of rights is to try to put guard rails, so there aren’t (for example) purges/genocides, removing a little under half the populations rights, etc. etc. but there is only so much rules can do.
So then it boils back down to 'most people are stupid' and the reason we have representative democracy is so we can cultivate a class of elites who are smart enough and have enough skin in the game to make good decisions for the rest of us.
People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.
It doesn’t require most people to be stupid. It just requires people to have other things they need to do, and pay attention to, and limited ability to give a shit.
If everyone has to be paying attention all the time (and it would be 150% of the time with modern society), everyone is susceptible to being drowned in bullshit and either checking out or being manipulated.
Even with what we have now, that is exactly what is going on. Direct democracy would be even worse.
> would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
Those are actually great examples of where federalism plus direct democracy works better than aggregated democracy. There are fundamental worldview differencs on abortion that a plebescite can't reconcile. The failure of direct democracy is it short circuits deliberation. So to make it work, you need another layer where deliberation occurs.
The Swiss seem to have solved this neatly: the representative body deliberates, and then the population gets and up-down vote.
Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues.
I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of government, but we should take all the highly partisan crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.
You have a huge, huge misunderstanding of how direct democracy turns out.
Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that.
So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening.
There is on average over 1 new bill a day that gets voted on in Congress. Those are the bills that get past committees.
Everyone still complains it is impossible to get Congress to actually do anything, since this is a huge country with 300+ million people.
If we didn’t have a ton of filtering (by whom? And who gets to decide that, is who has real power!) we’d probably have 10K+ new laws a day being proposed.
What do you expect the voting process to actually look like?
I don't know what I expect the voting process to look like, but you seem to be assuming the worst without even thinking it through very much. I'm not an expert, I just don't think we should throw out ideas based on poor strawman implementations.
I'm not saying we put every insignificant little thing on the ballot, but lets say once every 4 years we take the real hot button issues that congress perennially uses as political football, and put them on a ballot. Abortion legal before the age of viability, yes or no. Medicare for all, yes or no. Legalizing cannabis, ditto.
I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the will of the people because some rich dudes with superpacs feel otherwise.
They’re going to be the ones with the real power. Who gets to decide who they are?
The reasons these issues get used as political football is precisely because there is a lot less consistent belief on what ‘the right thing’ is to do on those issues than you’d think, which is why they can be polarizing. And trying to force everyone to follow the same rule is undesirable for a large portion of the population.
The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.
The main thing the Swiss have that Americans don't are referendums that can seriously challenge federal action. And then there are the state versions of that. And they don't have to wait for "the cycle". Or have results made null by arbitrary veto powers.
Sure, but who is going to be elected who would do that?
And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?
And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?
I highly doubt the US system can be fixed peacefully. I really wish it were, since the US affects a lot of the rest of the world (including where I live).
That one definitely reflects that the founders tended to limit voting to those with higher level of stakes in society (usually land owners).
While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.
> We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy
We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.
The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)
In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.
The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.
My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
This wasn't "suposed" to be an issue because the federal government was only really supposed to meddle in things that were obviously common issues or flagrantly interstate.
But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
The problem is too much centralization of power in the federal government, when the entire purpose of the constitution was supposed to be to LIMIT the power of the federal government so that states could mostly govern themselves.
California should make it's own laws, Montana should make it's own laws - and the federal government should set out the rules on how they talk to each-other.
States Rights are supposed to be the protection against political-party and legislator capture at the federal level.
There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.
They might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but I don't see how you can argue that things that happened after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their decisions while writing it.
So maybe we're saying that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, not visionaries. Maybe they only had the same myopic 10-20 year view that anyone else today does.
I think there is very little our founding fathers would recognize about today's american government, in a wide variety of ways.
Jefferson was probably the least myopic among them, in at least recognizing that all humans are myopic and struggle to have any concept of what the future holds.
Senators represent their State government, not the people. Americans didn't even vote for Senators until sometime in the 20th century. Traditionally they were selected by the State legislatures. Similarly, the President is the President of the States, not the people.
If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic.
The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to represent the people.
Intended to, but due to the Permanent Apportionment Act, does not do so in actuality.
Congress is currently structured so that both chambers provide outsized representation to lower population states. With how the electoral college works, this also provides them with outsized representation in presidential selection, as well.
If it was reasonable to argue that the House should not invest so much power into higher population states, then it is reasonable to argue that the Senate should not invest so much power into lower population states as well.
The Senate
- Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators
- Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together
The House
- Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC
- All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)
- Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas
- Ranked choice voting everywhere
Maybe the territories get less representation.
The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats.
There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic.
Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.
> The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people
The Senate does not represent the people. The House of Representatives represents the people. The Senate represents the states. That's why there are two senators per state and the number of representatives depends on the population of the state.
It's so bizarre when American's don't understand their own democracy and a foreigner has to explain it to them.
The US founding fathers learned from history and designed the US democracy to be more like the Roman system. In Greece they had a more direct democracy. That led to mob mentality. The Romans split the powers between different bodies and people. There were two executives (consuls). There were two legislative powers: the senate and the plebeian council.
The system was set up with conflicting groups. When they agreed reforms were enacted, when they disagreed the country stays the same. This was not a bug, it was an intentional feature.
The US democratic system was inspired by this.
Senators are supposed to represent states. That's why they were appointed, not elected. Senators have only been elected from 1913 when the 17th amendment passed.
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On a separate not, this is also why the US does not have direct elections. The elector system is designed to take into account states, not just people. If it didn't exist. Candidates would only campaign in the populous east and west coast.
> The House of Representatives represents the people.
The House of Representatives represented the people until 1929 and the Permanent Apportionment Act.
The reasoning campaigned on for this act? To protect low population states from high population ones.
The House represents the people more than the Senate, but it still provides proportionally more power per capita to lower population states than higher population ones.
Repeal the 17th, overwrite the PAA, and we're back to something more closely resembling what the founding fathers intended. In the mean time, with the House having departed from their intent, it's just as reasonable for people to suggest the Senate depart from their intent too.
Equal State representation in the Senate is on the shortlist of things that is practically impossible to amend [0], but I propose a workaround:
Amend the state-formation rules [1] so that any state may subdivide without Senate approval, provided that (A) it occurs entirely within its existing borders and (B) no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.
This means small states don't have to give up their disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they cannot use that power to monopolize it either. Any state above a certain size (>2x the smallest) may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.
For example, if California really wanted to it could split into anywhere between 2-67 states with just approval from the House of Representatives. Due to diminishing returns, the higher numbers are rather unlikely.
This satisfies Article V, Section 5, since no state is being deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just like before.
i think we should just swear in every US citizen as a supreme court justice and then have 157,382,103-50,373,281 rulings on whatever issues we want to put to a plebiscite
I don't think the senate is necessarily the _biggest_ flaw, but it's close.
A bigger flaw I think is the apportionment of house reps, and that the number of house reps hasn't changed in nearly 100 years.
Splitting the Dakota Territory into North and South to get two extra senators is pretty egregious and should be counteracted with DC and Puerto Rico being admitted as states.
The issue is that post WW2 (and perhaps Great Depression) gave the federal gov’t too much power (and money), resulting in a lot of low level meddling.
It’s why we have federal law on everything from drugs to creeks to porn, when these issues typically are better handled at the state (or even lower) level.
Exactly! We are in a 'time to time' 200-year period of trying something other than equal-vote democracy, but ultimately it is not going to be sustainable.
I could say the same thing about the House of Reps, which has been frozen since 1929 and represents 3x more people per politician than it did then, is not equally distributed, and holds far more power and rights today than it ever did in the past.
Opinions on this whole topic seem to revolve around how you conceive of the states in the US. Do you seem them as legitimate and important power structures, or essentially arbitrary boundaries which are relics of the past?
To me, it is both fascinating and horrifying to imagine a periodic "fractal redistricting" of boundaries. Imagine the tension and chaos to reorganize the voting public and administrative functions based on the census, with no municipal, county, or state boundaries being set in stone...
Since changing the constitution is difficult, maybe a reasonable remedy to this would be to significantly increase the number of states by population. In 1776 there were 13 states with a total population of 2.5M. There are now 50 states (3.8x increase), with a total population of 340M (136x increase). If we increased the number of states proportionally to the population in 1776 that would result in ~1768 states, almost one for every two counties.
Only takes President + a simple majority in the Senate to make every US citizen a Supreme Court justice - and the Supreme Court can conjure and erase legal obligations at will.
The Senate was absolutely one of the best features of government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government? In Britain, its name more honestly reflected the class it represents, House of Lords.
In Britain there is no Congress. The name of the House of Lords has nothing to do with the United States' Senate. If we are to believe that its form and function were inspired by some other nation's government, then let's talk about its true namesake: the Roman Senate.
I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.
The Roman Senate was a unicameral form of government. Bicameralism principally comes from Britain, the country which we were formerly a colony of and which gave us our dominant language, legal code, ….
That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government?
- Longer terms mean that senators can spend more time governing, less time running for election, and they can take a longer view on the impact of their decisions
- Filibuster means that a tiny minority cannot force legislation through
The filibuster is not a feature inherent to the Senate and could be removed at any time with a simple majority, just like it has been done for the filibuster for several types of nominations, and was threatened during this past shutdown.
I also assume you meant tiny majority, as the minority cannot force legislation through regardless of whether the filibuster exists or not.
The States are a gerrymandering. Five states have populations less than a million and three wouldn't even qualify for Member of Congress by census. Yet they get two Senators, a Member and three Electoral College votes.
You've got filibuster backwards. Filibuster grants rights to a Senate minority.
> States aren't gerrymandering because the people decide for themselves where to live.
The people can also decide for themselves where they want to live with respect to gerrymandered Congressional and other districts. So by your logic, gerrymandering doesn't exist at that level either.
You're not going to convince me that some procedural nonsense is more important than equal representation.
“No gerrymandering”. Wut? The Senate is the most egregious example of anti-democratic systems in any country you could reasonably call democratic. It’s far worse than the worst examples of gerrymandering.
I get what you are saying, but I think gerrymandering is a specific thing -- voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose. You pick the state you want to live in, and the boundaries are not going to change. But at least every 10 years the congressional district you live in may change without you having any say. So it is definitely worse though I think the lopsided representation due to the senate is pretty shitty too.
> voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose
With the Missouri Compromise, when territories were admitted, their voters were being chosen for political reasons. Territories were admitted two by two, slave holding and free to maintain a status quo. This falls under your definition of gerrymandering.
There is no justification for this gerrymandering. There's nothing so great about Wyoming such that it should have such an outsized influence on the body politic while possessing the GDP of a mid-sized county.
The senate was explicitly designed to provide a brake on the democratic aspirations of the lower classes by the founders.
American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will and preserve the property and political control of elites.
The senate should be abolished along with the undemocratic supreme court (as currently constituted with lifetime appointments and the ability to overrule congress at a whim) and the imperial presidency.
To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
That can be stopped easily enough. The Constitution makes it clear that Congress is the ultimate source of power; the SCOTUS power of judicial review was granted to itself by itself. Congress can (and has, a few times, though not often) make legislation not subject to judicial review.
The problem is that it is far, far more difficult for the legislature to "fix" a decision by SCOTUS than it is for SCOTUS to "fix" an unconstitutional law.
Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen again unless we face an existential threat or civil conflict.
The funny thing is that the discussion we're having, about congressional representation, already has an amendment out there floating around, waiting to be ratified. Already has 11 or 12 states who have ratified it (I forget). It can't be canceled or expired or cockblocked. If you live in a state outside of New England, you could petition your state legislators to ratify it tomorrow. And if even one state were to ratify it, others would notice and follow.
It's not unlikely. It's just... I don't know. It's as if some Svengali is out there hypnotnizing you dolts to ignore it. No other explanation makes sense. Seriously, this could be down to 2-3 jackass state representatives in Iowa or New Mexico or Florida just getting a wild hair up their ass.
> Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen
I agree, we seem to have perfected the art of splitting of the population into fairly stable tribes similar in size. Unless one side goes batshit insane (and even then, I think current evidence counters this idea) there is probably not going to be a supermajority in the foreseeable future.
People that say this are only looking to ensure the repression of those at the bottom of the totem pole remain oppressed! It's a direct path to fascism, and it is designed entirely to massively accumulate wealth at the top of the pyramid while ensuring all others starve and suffer!
If you're going to make inane comments about how ahckchtually everything in the world is a creation of the man who just wants to keep us down, you'll need to qualify the statements.
>American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will
The "democratic will", like the people who manifest it, is so bizarrely stupid that there are no insults strong enough to properly insult it. If it can be tolerated at all, then it is so only when there are brakes strong enough to slow it down and force it to think carefully.
>To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
Why would I (or anyone like me) ever agree to a new constitution that someone like yourself approves of? The whole point of the constitution as written was that people like yourself couldn't easily come in and change all the rules when our vigilance relaxed a bit, but here you are not even trying to hide it: you want to change all the rules in one fell swoop. No thanks. Do it the hard way to prove to yourself (and the rest of us) that a vast majority want those changes.
I think senators should be appointed by the states again, repeal the 17th.
Please don't fulminate or make personal attacks on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for something better here, and we've had to ask you several times to try harder to observe them. We eventually have to ban accounts that keep commenting like this.
I think OP is arguing that because they literally said "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body."
Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people. So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
> Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people.
I haven't claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people. I also haven't claimed that OP claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people.
> So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
He didn't say either of those things. He said this "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people."
I know that's what he typed, I'm asking what he meant. The Senate does not represent 350 million people. It has never represented people. It was never meant to represent people. Of course it's a ridiculous way of representing people, in the same way that a hammer is a ridiculous tool for heating something up. It's a completely nonsensical statement.
The insane thing about the US is that 350M people are being represented. The government needs to represent a minority of people in order to become functional again.
many non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral legislature, why do you think that is considering they never considered counting their slaves...?
Bicameralism appeared very, very early on. There’s a well known case of a missing pig in 1642’s Boston (with a population of less than 2000 at the time) that finally solidified splitting the assembly into two chambers, and that debate has been going on for a while at the time already https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default/files/proc...
Non-proportionately? For example the Netherlands has a senate but the weight of senators per province is set by population. They don't let Saba have equal powers with Utrecht, which is exactly what the American system does. Other Anglosphere countries — all of which have exceptionally bad forms of government due to the legacy of England and the early influence of the United States Constitution — have upper houses that do not have America's weird geographic correspondece.
There is a particular sort of partisan who loathes any process, procedure, or rule that acts as an impediment to his agenda. Never mind that, quite often, these same processes, procedures, and rules often act as impediments to his opponents when they are (temporarily) in the majority, he sees his faction as ascendant forever because the universe is designed to promote his peculiar idea of progress and thus there is no longer any need for those hurdles and obstacles. In hushed whispers he might even confess he thinks there never was a need, that those were put in place by his enemies to thwart his righteous cause.
The Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone else. We need it, or something like it. People in coastal cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance that people in such states would have their needs met in the slightest under your system.
The real biggest problem in the US is the steady power grabs by the federal government (most notably by FDR but he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last). The federal government has far too much power, completely illegally under the Constitution, and it causes most of the acrimony in US politics. You simply cannot have one central body adequately meet the needs of both NYC and rural Wyoming, but we are determined as a society to keep jamming that square peg into the round hole. We desperately need to dismantle power from the federal government and return it to the states, who should've held it all along.
As someone in flyover country, I don't think anybody in the coastal cities hates me, and I have never encountered someone from a big urban area that has treated me badly based on geography-that sounds like propaganda meant to divide people.
I don't hate the rest of the country and it is actually the primary target of where I would support redistributing resources from richer more productive states.
Smaller and more rural states are a massive beneficiaries of the centralized system, especially the income taxation system.
